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Philosophers Alphabetized



Just as an arbitrary exercise, I thought I'd compile an alphabetical list thus:

BAE09705.jpg
The greatest philosopher whose name began with A was/is ... etc. 

 All choices are  arbitrary. Obviously this is NOT a list of the 26th greatest thinkers, and if I drew up such a list a one-per-letter result would be a very odd coincidence. 

 Here, then, is what I came up with.

 Averroes (portrayed above); 
[Henri] Bergson; 
[Albert] Camus; 
[Rene] Descartes; 
[Mary Baker] Eddy; 
[Gustav] Fechner; 
[Kurt] Godel; 
[Anne] Hutchinson; 
Isaac Israeli the Elder; 
[William] James; 
[Immanuel] Kant; 
[Georg] Lukacs; 
[G.E.] Moore; 
Nishida; 
Ockham; 
[Blaise] Pascal; 
[W.V.O.] Quine; 
[Josiah] Royce; 
Socrates; 
[Leo] Tolstoy; 
[Dmitri] Uznadze; 
[Hans] Vaihinger; 
[Ludwig] Wittgenstein; 
Xun Kuang; 
[William Butler] Yeats; 
Zeno of Elea.

 Yes, I've rather deliberately snubbed some big traditional names. Neither Plato nor Aristotle, neither Marx nor Hegel, neither Hobbes nor Locke. Marxists might be mollified a mite by my use of the letter L; advocates of the centrality of the classical Greek figures will appreciate the letter S; those of the empirical Brits might turn to M or O. 

 Within my beloved pragmatist tradition, I've had to make due without Peirce or Dewey. Dewey has a surrogate of a sort in Uznadze, the most important educational theorist of Soviet history.  But I couldn't see "D" standing for anyone other than Descartes. 

 To include anyone else there would be like putting Des Cart before des horse.
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